Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974)

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Ishiro Honda's Gojira (1954)

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Phil Tucker's Robot Monster in 3-D (1953) and National Geographic's Sea Monsters 3D (2007)

The Rubicon and SPA Film Club present
"3-D: Then and Now"

Then… Robot Monster

In 1953, the first major motion picture in 3-D (Man in the Dark) hit theaters. Patrons donned their anaglyph glasses, sat in stadium seats and watched as American cinema changed forever.

In that same year, 25-year old Phil Tucker directed and released Robot Monster, a science fiction movie shot and projected in dual-strip, polarized 3-D. The stereoscopic photography in the film is high quality for the time, impressive from a crew that had no experience with the previously unused camera rig. In spite of this accomplishment, Robot Monster is considered one of the worst films ever made.

So why would we choose it? Because it is SO bad, it’s good. Who can resist a character like the evil “Ro-man” who comes to earth in his bad gorilla suit and diving helmet to exterminate all the “hu-mans” remaining after the rocket explosions, lightning storms and giant lizard attacks? Or odd courting rituals like tying a woman up to show her deep, undying affection? And who can forget moments like Ro-Man’s impassioned line (think Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech): “I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet? Yet I must - but I cannot!” Try getting that one past an SPA English teacher in an essay. No, actually… please don’t.

This film is wonderfully terrible and an important 66 minutes of 3-dimensional history.

Now… Sea Monsters 3-D: A Prehistoric Adventure

The way monsters are depicted in National Geographic’s Sea Monsters is a stark contrast to the 3-D of the 1950s. While Robot Monster focuses on adding depth behind the screen, the Sea Monsters swim toward the viewer. In truth, both effects are created by playing with depth perception but that is not the point: truly, you will be carried away by the mysterious creatures in this animated documentary.

Sea Monsters shows what marine life looked like in prehistoric times, and you will see no gorilla suits, here: everything from the Dolichorhynchops family we follow through the film to the amazing Styxosaurus, a fish larger than an adult male, is connected to archeological discovery.

Not only is Sea Monsters 3-D, but it was shot in IMAX for the biggest of the big screens. National Geographic cut no corners making this film; they brought in big names like Tony Award-winning actor Liev Schreiber to narrate; Richard Evans, David Rhodes and Peter Gabriel collaborated on the score. Think of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything, John Cusak and boom box and you’ll recall how iconic Gabriel’s music can be in a film.

And speaking of the 1980s, when I was in elementary and middle school 3-D films made a comeback, especially with sequel thrillers. Jaws 3-D (1983) and Friday, the 13^th 3-D (1982) hit the screens and had me covering my eyes but peeking through my fingers. So when The Rubicon staff said, “Let’s do a 3-D issue,” I couldn’t help but think terrifying … and fun!

Today 3-D is more popular than it has ever been. With the invention of Real 3-D and 3-D televisions, the big screen magic 1953 film patrons experienced can be replicated in the comfort of your own family room… or in Bigelow Commons. Enjoy the shows!

Kathryn Campbell
The Rubicon Adviser

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

How do we watch a silent movie like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)? Really, most film-goers feel the same way about silent film that we feel about rotary phones and typewriters – why would we even spend time on something so technologically out of date? Well, we’re not dealing with a tool here (you don’t use a movie), we’re looking at an art form. One of the problems with film lately is that the technology of it, special effects if you will, seems to have overwhelmed our appreciation of that.

So say this to yourself, out loud (or you can silently mouth it for less ironic effect): silent film is not an antiquated, obsolete method of movie-making. It is a specific form of expression, different from what we are currently used to. Few musicians currently write and perform music using the instrumentation of the western European medieval period (the lute! the sackbut! the hautbois! the vielle!), but that doesn’t mean that the music of that period has no value or that it cannot be appreciated. In fact, it’s pretty cool. And so is silent film.

Here are some things to love about silent film. First, its black and whiteness. Nosferatu is a horror movie, and horror movies are better in black and white. Yes, we know blood looks cooler if it’s actually red, but horror movies are more effective if they don’t show the blood. The original Halloween (1978), for example, avoids any blood, and it’s a slasher movie, but it is scarier than most of the horror that follows it in the genre because so much of takes place in your mind. Psychological horror is freakier than gross-out horror. Black and white further engages the psychological effect of a film because it recedes from the verisimilitude of color, it’s unreal. And horror is all about otherness. What’s more, if you do have blood, isn’t it creepier if it’s black? Tim Burton thought so in Batman Returns (1992).

Second, silent movies are silent. Film-makers struggled for 30 years to sync up sound with image, a technological difficulty that took ingenuity to overcome and didn’t happen until 1925. But in the meantime, the silent approach developed into a laudable form. Watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) sometime. Underneath its musical plot, it recaps the transition from silent to sound and acknowledges that many great silent actors could not make that transition because their voices weren’t auralgenic.

But look at that phrase: “great silent actors.” What does that mean? It means that actors of the silent era created indelible characters, memorable, expressive, larger-than-life actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and on and on. And a lot of them did this with their faces; if you can’t speak out loud, emotion must be communicated through face and physical expression. Watch for this in Nosferatu, how the actors capture love, horror, fear, sadness – the basic human emotions – effortlessly with their faces. Now, this is a bit more expressionistic, or exaggerated for emotional effect, than we’re used to, and that can seem weird. But as we get used to it we realize we’re seeing human emotion more clearly as an element of narrative than we do in modern film.

Finally, one of the modern film-making’s most bothersome elements, to this writer anyway, is the soundtrack, so manipulative, so distracting, so much like a band-aid slapped over a film’s weaknesses or a chaperone that interferes with our engagement with a hot date. In true silent film, film without the ongoing organ accompaniment that would have been improvised and played by an organist, live during the movie, we connect directly with these emotions. All modern DVDs of silent film include musical accompaniment, mostly because contemporary film fans cannot fathom the total absence of sound. We’ll leave the recorded organ accompaniment turned on during tonight’s screening, but imagine if it was just you, and the vampire, alone in a castle room so dark there’s no color, and no one can hear you scream. Because there is no sound.

Happy Halloween!

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

For years and years, the image of Frankenstein as a square-headed, stiff-limbed, heavy-lidded, electrocuted monster has been the prevailing image for Halloween costumes and decorations. Almost solely because of the 1931 film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, the first image that tends to come to mind when someone mentions Frankenstein tends to be this goofy-looking creature, which is interesting because Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creation.

That’s the power Whale’s film has had over our impression of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, written in 1818. The book and the movie may share a name, but further than that, few similarities are to be found between them. Shelley’s version is a Romantic novel that raises questions about the meaning of life, how we can maintain our humanity after the groundbreaking discoveries of the Industrial Revolution, and our responsibilities for the world we create, while Whale’s film is an early horror movie that plays on our fears of the unknown, unchecked science, and human hubris with shock value and a brain-dead monster. In the novel, it is important that the monster has human, if not super-human, characteristics because Shelley sought to explore questions of Man’s place in the universe. In the movie, the (un)jolly green giant bears no similarity to a real man; it is a despicable monster, a sub-human, that needs to be destroyed.

The reason that the movie took such a different direction than the novel is that contemplation and discussion about whether or not scientific advancements will benefit mankind doesn’t sell. Horror movies with a clear villain (the mad scientist), a dumb assistant (the hunchback), and a disgusting monster does, especially in a time, the onset of the Depression, when film was growing as a source of entertainment. People simply found it more fun to see a movie, with exciting costumes and special effects, and no thinking involved.

Certainly, Shelley’s novel has, and probably would have without Whale’s film, stood the test of time. Since the original movie, Frankenstein has been both seriously remade and parodied over and over again, whether in films like Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 feature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody, Young Frankenstein, or Frank Henelotter’s 1990 black comedy, Frankenhooker, or Tim Burton’s 1984 short, Frankenweenie (the movie that got Burton fired from Disney, which we’re showing this evening), suggesting the staying power of Shelley’s vision.

But it is Whale’s movie that inaugurated the visual interpretations of Shelley’s book, and subsequent film versions, many closer to the novel’s intent and depictions, have not displaced Whale’s imagery from the popular consciousness. Little kids think the creature is named Frankenstein, has bolts in his neck, wears really big shoes, and that you could balance a stack of books easily on his head because it is flat. And every mad scientist who, upon viewing the result of his work, cried out to the heavens “IT’S ALIVE!” owes a debt to Whale’s lasting and iconic vision.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire (1985)

Zac: Hi, I'm Zac Lutz, co-President of the SPA Film Club.

RF: I'm Randall Findlay, adviser of the SPA Film Club.

Zac: And we're here to discuss Mr. Vampire, a 1980s Hong Kong martial arts vampire comedy horror flick starring Ching-Ying Lam, who has made over 90 martial arts films including Gui Meng Jao, Mi Zong Cheng Long, and Huang Fei-hong Xi Lie Zhi Yi Dai Shi.

RF: Wow. I didn't know you spoke Chinese. What's Mr. Vampire about?

Zac: Mr. Vampire is a movie that is both exciting and funny while still trying to be nothing but itself, something that seems increasingly rare in modern film. It is about a man, who is a sort of vampire-expert priest guy in charge of the morgue and who sports an aggressive uni-brow. It's also about his two assistants, whose names are strangely very American. The two assistants are quite easy to relate to, as they keep on trying to do their work right, but constantly mess up or fool around, and yet the morgue master guy keeps them around for some reason.

RF: Man, you're right about that uni-brow. I see that the sequel to this movie, and there are five, is entitled One-Eyebrow Priest. And he's a great martial arts master. But he does leave a lot be desired when it comes to hiring employees. The whole plot in Mr. Vampire is moved along by the incompetence of the people who work for him.

Zac: In a way, this seems to be a sort of underlying idea, that despite the comically bumbling nature of the assistants, the morgue master guy still sees how they try so hard to please him, and most of the time they manage to do things right. All of the characters in Mr. Vampire work together very well, and their relationships to one another are definitely believable.

RF: It is interesting that you would say that. After all, the genre of this film is fantasy. I mean, hopping vampires, seductive ghosts, bumbling servants who release zombies because they're screwing around rather than doing their job! Realism is a noun I wouldn't have applied to this film, or the others in the same genre, like Sammo Hung's Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind.

Zac: As far as that goes, there aren't really any parts that seem cheesily unrealistic except for the ghost lady who shows up a bit later and a bit randomly.

RF: Point taken. I remember the first time I saw the film. I saw the vampires hopping, and I started laughing out loud. I thought it was so funny. But at the same time, it's a little creepy. How would you rate this film?

Zac: The vampires themselves are actually fairly menacing, and their stiff hopping seems quite natural as far as how a dead person might move. Overall, the story is easy to follow, although the beginning is a bit confusing, as well as the introduction of the ghost lady, and some of the translations are rather abrupt.

RF: Speaking of abrupt, that's all the time we have. Enjoy the film!

Zac Lutz and R. Findlay
Film Club